felis_ultharus: The Pardoner from the Canterbury Tales (Default)
felis_ultharus ([personal profile] felis_ultharus) wrote2006-11-23 07:32 am

(no subject)

Just a little post to say that I'm not dead. It'll be a bit of time before I have time to go through friends' pages, tho.

I've been working a lot on the non-novel, and I'm past the thirty-page mark, which means it's not going to be a short story.

My last course is going well. I'm still settling on an essay topic. I read John Lyly's Gallathea -- a source text for Shakespeare's As You Like It. Gallathea posits that two women can find happiness and true love together, and should be alowed to marry so long as a deity descends to turn one of them into a man.

This rather contrived ending allows Lyly to sidestep the problem of two women being in love in Renaissance society. After all, if one of them doesn't get turned into a man -- which neaither wants -- he's got a true love story without a marriage at the end. And a comedy is "a play that ends in marriage," so with five minutes left in the play, the goddess Venus decides to zap our two young lesbians into heteronormativity.

I've decided to call this the "penis ex machina" ending.

And I keep picturing Peter the Alchemist's Apprentice as Ed from Fullmetal Alchemist.

[identity profile] jenjoou.livejournal.com 2006-11-23 04:50 pm (UTC)(link)

And I keep picturing Peter the Alchemist's Apprentice as Ed from Fullmetal Alchemist.


*chuckle* That happens to me. When I was reading the Tale of Genji, I kept imagining him looking like Sai from Hikaru no Go... which was a vast improvement on the illustrations on the cover of the book, trust me.

[identity profile] felis-ultharus.livejournal.com 2006-11-25 05:44 pm (UTC)(link)
It usually is a big improvement ^_^

Last time Japanese pop culture characters invaded my readings, it was Zelda and Link playing the Faerie Queene and the Red Crosse Knight. Which was better than how Spencer probably imagined them.

[identity profile] em-fish.livejournal.com 2006-11-24 01:04 am (UTC)(link)
My new goal in life is to work the phrase "penis ex machina" into every conversation I have, from now until the end of time.

[identity profile] felis-ultharus.livejournal.com 2006-11-25 05:45 pm (UTC)(link)
I've always liked variations on "ex machina." I've also had to use "quaker ex machina" in class.

My favourite recent coinage in class was "humanist Tourettes" to describe Lyly's style in Endymion.